Science Of The Day
Out of context: Reply #205
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Breakthrough: UH team successfully locates incoming asteroid
For the first time, astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi have demonstrated that their ATLAS and Pan-STARRS survey telescopes can provide sufficient warning to move people away from the impact site of an incoming asteroid. They detected a small asteroid prior to its entering the Earth's atmosphere near Puerto Rico on the morning of June 22, 2019.
The 4-meter diameter asteroid, named 2019 MO, was observed four times in a span of 30 minutes by the ATLAS Maunaloa facility, just after midnight Hawaiʻi time on the morning of Saturday, June 22. At that time, the asteroid was only 500,000 km from Earth - or 1.3 times the distance to the Moon. These initial observations were assessed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Scout impact analysis software, and the asteroid was given a modest impact rating of 2 (a rating of 4 is "likely"). However, JPL's Davide Farnocchia noted a possible match with an atmospheric infrasound detection near Puerto Rico about 12 hours later, and he asked if the community could search for additional observations.
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